Sharp and Sharp Laboratories of Europe announced their "Triple View" technology today, which builds upon their existing Dual View technology by adding a whole other viewing angle.

This development means that three people seated at different angles facing the same screen will each see a different image. Billy on your left sees a picture of a truck, you see a picture of a trout, and Bubba to your right sees a picture of a shotgun.

Sharp's own English press release offers more technical details. According to the Impress Watch article, a single LCD with a resolution of 533 x 480 dots is split into three different signals with a Parallax Barrier, giving each virtual "screen" a resolution of a mere 177 x 480. Not exactly earth shattering, but at least the technology now exists.

Clarion has announced the first line of car navigation products for the Japanese market. They offer integrated hard drives, 7" widescreen LCDs, linkage with 5th gen iPods for audio and video playback,  and even terrestrial digital tuners.

Our buddies down at "Heavy Moon" have come up with a nice looking adapter to power your iPod shuffle from your car's cigarette lighter.

Three new CD receivers from Panasonic - two of which aren't very interesting. The top-end "CD-C7301D", however, makes up for the mediocrity of the other two with a variable colour display (choose from one of 9,261 possibilities) and the ability to customise the display's background, startup and shutdown screens.

Here's a bizarre o­ne from Logitec: the "LAT-SD100MP3" has 8, count 'em, 8, SD card slots. Don't ask me why, but unless you've got a crapload of SD cards just sitting around your house (and happen to want to have them ALL inserted into the player at the same time), I think this is completely useless. At least it's cheap; o­nly 11,800 yen.

Here's Sanyo's new in-car navigation system, the "HD Gorilla." It seems to have a nice collection of features; 30GB hard drive, integrated TV tuner and FM transmitter, and what seems to be the new standard for navigation, 3D maps with realistic textures. It even rips CDs into everyone's favorite compression format, ATRAC, at 8x.

There's no mention of MP3 playback from DVD-R (though it can do CD), nor is there any mention of PC-side synchronization (like Sony's XYZ series).

Occasionally, the Japanese tech news sites turn up something not available elsewhere - like a pic of the new iPod-compatible car AV unit from Clarion! The unit will support control of the Apple iPod via its 7" wide touch-screen LCD, as well as power supply and charging functions.

I had heard about Windows Automotive, and you probably have too, but I basically ignored it. Well, this article got my attention -- Kenwood's "HDM-777" is not o­nly a hard drive navigation system, but it also features a DVD drive. It doesn't stop there; it also uses the internet to download new data and even connect to a home server.

We've got a couple car-related news items for you tonight.

To start things up, here's an in-dash model of Sony's "XYZ" navigation system with a hard drive. We previously covered the XYZ line when it was first announced, but these were "affixed to the dashboard of A/C vent panel." Not exactly the most convenient place for a navigation system.
I guess Sony realized this, because they've announced an in-dash version of the system. They've also added a couple features, such as MPEG-4 support, and simple operation of movies/audio with just a fingertip.

Matsushita Electric has added a couple of new models to their range of Strada car navigation systems - the HDD-based 2DIN CN-HDS930MD and the DVD-based CN-DS110. Both systems have an "Entertainment Bank" function that allows the playback of MPEG4, MP3 and JPEG files.